Once upon a time there was a magical little country named Lebanon. It was created by French imperialists out of the post-World War 1 wreckage of the Ottoman Empire as a mountainous stronghold for Levantine Maronite and Orthodox Christians.
Imperial Russia sought to assert its influence as defender of Lebanon’s Christians. The British and French thwarted Russia’s efforts and created two new states, Syria and Jordan. After the war, Israel was created by Britain. Some 750,000 Arabs who had been living in what was known as Palestine and Syria were driven from their homes by Jewish settlers. The Levant’s map was redrawn. What was to have been an Arab state was annexed by an expanding Israel and British-influenced Jordan, with little Lebanon sitting amid the geopolitical leftovers. Sixty percent of Jordan’s population was Palestinian. Nearly 60% of Lebanon’s population was Sunni and Shiite Muslim. The rest was Orthodox, Catholic, Druze and Armenian.
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In 1975 I landed in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, just in time for the first day of the 15 year long civil war that tore that nation apart and killed up to 200,000. All the pressures and hatreds that had been building up across multiethnic Lebanon exploded into one of the ugliest, most sadistic conflicts I had seen as a long-time war correspondent......
The next horrors were the massacres of Palestinians at the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps outside Beirut in 1982. Over 3,500 Palestinians were slaughtered by Lebanese Christian troops backed by Israeli forces. This crime helped end Lebanon’s ghastly civil war. But now, thanks to Israel’s latest invasion of Lebanon, the nightmare civil war may be about to come to life again – all thanks to Netanyahu and Trump, the so-called ‘men of peace.’
